


we jump through the crack between lives and emerge divine

by alachat



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, god as oc, i created god in my own image, ish, the ultimate definition of hubris and indulgence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 07:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26968483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alachat/pseuds/alachat
Summary: , where miracles are points of departure and defiance an act of devotion.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Hoshiumi Kourai
Comments: 7
Kudos: 39





	we jump through the crack between lives and emerge divine

**Author's Note:**

> cw: mentions of wars and allusions to death

What do you do while waiting for a bus?

a. read a book

b. listen to music

c. have an existential crisis

\---

The bus stop perching on the sea cliff is so deserted and decrepit that Hoshiumi Kourai almost fears for his life. Almost, since it doesn't matter, he's here already, and he can go nowhere else. A storm is brewing in the distance, its eye calm and menacing like that of a war-torn eye-patched brigadier. The shelter has no roof. There's no timetable. Kourai has no watch. There's nothing to do but wait. 

He slumps into the moth-eaten bench, half-heartedly hoping that it won't collapse under his weight. The wound on his thigh no longer hurts. The wound on his shoulder hums a phantom pain; he clutches it out of habit. The storm sniggers maniacally, twirling its dark clouds in a mocking dance. The wind slaps his skin red and raw, making him shiver. 

If he could, Kourai would punch it. The storm, the wind, fate, his existence, God. He can't, so he crumples the ticket in his hand and casts his eyes skywards, searching Armageddon for a drop of light. 

"It won't rain." 

A voice floats out of the cold. Kourai freezes. His hands fly to his rifle, which is no longer there. Seconds stretch into eternity, and eternity unfolds into echoes of air through lungs and footsteps on gravel.

From the darkness emerges a young man no older than Kourai. His hair and eyes are sun-soaked orange, out of place under a roofless shelter amidst an impending storm. He's wearing a wilted green uniform with which Kourai is intimately, belligerently familiar. Has seen it in his waking nightmares, where the sky turns to ash and the earth to shards. Has observed it through the muzzle of his rifle, fingers ready to make poppies bloom from brass buttons. Has watched it charge at him, a tsunami out to consume, a tragedy made to subsume. Has glimpsed it before he falls, back towards the ground, face towards the sky.

At the last flashback Kourai tenses up, his hands clenching into fists and his stomach to knots. The stranger seems to sense his hostility, for he raises his arms up in surrender. His eyes gleam, but not with the bloodlust born from fear and the rhythmic sound of musketry that men like him, like them, can recite by rote. He doesn't look scared, or despaired. There's serenity on his flushed face; there's friendliness in the sheepish smile that wouldn't be there if they were not here, at this bus stop, this full stop. It reminds Kourai that it doesn't matter anymore. 

"How do you know?" Kourai lets his fists loose. He scoots to one end of the bench. 

"I've been here a few times, unfortunately," the stranger beams as he sits down at the other end. 

"Were the waits long?" Kourai asks. He doesn't like waiting. Not here. 

"Depends. Has it been long for you?"

Kourai has no watch. Nor anything. They are taken away from him when the tsunami breaks at the front line. He leaves them behind when he falls and tragedy becomes a brand on his name, just like every other name in that day and age. He has nothing, when he turns up here alone, searching Armageddon in vain for light.

"What if I don't want to wait anymore?" he answers with a question, more to himself than to the stranger. More to God than to himself. His mother often says he was born with a God-defying streak. Maybe today is the day to make full use of that.

For a while the stranger contemplates the storm, which is making sport of them with flashes of lightning out on the sea. Next he contemplates God, who probably is also making sport of them with false hope and falsehood out on the tips of tongues. Then he catches Kourai's eyes with his. 

Kourai thinks he might be why there's no sun in the sky. There's never a need for two. 

"You don't have to wait," the stranger says, measuring each syllable like an apothecary who knows too well the dose makes the poison. "But I hope you do," he sugars the words with sincerity.

"Why?" Kourai isn't sure that all things sweet are panacea. Or all poison isn't sweet. 

"Because if you don't, your weight would be mine to bear,” the stranger replies. “And I don't think I could manage that." For a moment his eyes disappear in Kourai's flashbacks. Wars do that to you, to him, to Kourai, to everyone. No one escapes unscathed. No one remains unmarred. Made of losses and laments how heavy are his service medals? Do they crush his chest too, like a parting hug from something eternal?

If they do, the stranger doesn't show it. "So, please?" The sheepish smile quickly returns. His gaze once again weighs an entire sun. Kourai doesn't look away.

"Even if we are enemies?" His voice is as heavy as steel. 

"Not here. Not anymore."

"Even if life is so unfair it breaks you?" Me. Sometimes. Definitely this time. 

"Even so. There are things only life can offer."

"Like heartbreaks and miseries?" Kourai lets bitterness drip like over-brewed coffee. Life is unfair, that everyone knows. But only those with the shortest straw know that life also has a predilection for evisceration, normally with a katana, every so often with cruelty so imaginative and savagery so original that the katana becomes a leniency. 

"Yes," the stranger drinks up Kourai’s words without batting an eyelash. "But there are other things. Brighter things. Love. Joy. Eggs."

"Eggs?" The odd priority list knocks a laugh out of Kourai, loud and sharp and against his will. If there were birds here they would be startled and fly away. The stranger doesn't flinch.

"Yes, eggs. Over rice, with a dash of soy sauce. The yolks shining like suns melted. The rice fluffy like a bed of cloud." 

"Just that?" 

"Sometimes, it's the smallest, simplest things that keep me walking on," the stranger grins, bright as light. 

Kourai wants to look away. He wants to stay basking in light. He thinks he's toeing somewhere between salvation and damnation. It's a tricky act, like walking a tightrope. He wants to say something, but his mind rushes to compile a priority list of his own out of a hilariously misplaced competitiveness.

On the bleakest of days, when the world caves in and there's only space for yourself, it's the smallest, simplest things that come out on top. Larger things can wait. Heartbreaks and miseries can wait. So can love and joy, if they feel too immense, too intense. And Armageddon and the weight of living when life has a predilection for eviscerating those with the shortest straw. Put them underneath eggs.

Kourai is, admittedly, ambivalent about eggs, but he does like potatoes, especially his mother's deep-fried chips. Made crisp in beef tallow. Made golden in love. Things that matter. 

Put them above eggs. 

Since God is still making sport of them, right at that moment a horn sounds, obnoxious enough to shatter the gravitational pull of the stranger's eyes. Between a blink and a breath, a single-decker bus as yellow as lemon turns up. Its destination indicator reads 783r. 

"It's my bus," the stranger says apologetically as he stands up.

"So unfair. I was here first," Kourai chuckles as Armageddon returns to nip at his heels. He ignores it in favour of folding the stranger's smile into halves into fourths into sixteenths and tuck it in his chest pocket beneath the brass buttons where poppies bloom.

The stranger walks towards the bus. His hand grips the frame of the door, his feet halfway from havoc to haven. From haven to halation. Then he turns round and, for emphasis, for sport, for posterity, repeats his coup de grâce. His benediction.

"I really hope you wait." 

Kourai watches until the yellow bus disappears. The storm continues to brew in the distance. The wind turns his cheeks red and raw. He doesn't shiver. He decides to give eggs another chance so that he can be like the stranger. So that he can walk on further than forever.

\---

e. meet a stranger

\--

God is a woman with a passion for interior design. She is particularly fond of points of departure—places where waiting is the default activity, where paths cross only to diverge, where strangers meet strangers once and forever have their world tilted, by 5 degrees, 71.3 degrees, 189 and five quarters degrees, left to right, upside down, inside out, until a crack forms in the middle of it all and from there the world is born anew. 

So she builds limbo into bus stops and train stations and harbours and departure lounges, because in limbo waiting is all you can do. And if you clutch your straw tight enough, you might also meet a stranger who spins the world in your hand until it shines. 

God also has a questionable taste, according to the 14th seraph, who doesn't hesitate to make this known whenever they can:

"The taxi rank in the midst of an avalanche, my Ladyship? The dilapidated bus stop facing a raging tempest? The abandoned tube station on the verge of collapsing? In my most humble opinion, there is absolutely no reason for limbo to look like an apocalypse lived twice over."

"It's not about reason, my dearest seraph," says God benignly. "It's about the aesthetic."

The seraph's bottom left wing aches. It's psychosomatic, they are told.

"And sometimes," God continues as she sips her gimlet, eyes resting on a dim and distant truth at the fraying edge of the universe, "you can only begin where the world ends. When the world ends."

At this the seraph shakes their wings slightly, but they offer no grievance. 

\---

The departure lounge has the highest ceiling Kourai has ever seen. High enough to form a square with the largest ocean. High enough to hold two skies stacked vertically. High enough to entice, to invite, to make Kourai wish for wings so that he can reach those ivory vaults. 

He has been here before, he thinks, between two other lives. He recognises the colossal colonnades, the clamorous crowd, the capricious craving for flight. He knows by sight the expanse of blue beyond the rooflight. There's a familiar ticket in his hand. There's unmistakable marble under his feet. 

He likes it here. He likes the floor-to-ceiling windows. He likes the lush greenery. He likes that there's a life fully coloured behind him, eggshell blue spilling over the lines in spades. And that another life remains blank in front of him, unprimed, uncharted, this time all the more inviting. 

Yet a part of him wants to have been somewhere else. Somewhere between a life half finished and an Armageddon, with a sunless sky and a pair of sun-soaked eyes. In the back of his mind loops an odd priority list. Close to his heart lie words warmed with a laugh and sweetened with light.

In life Kourai doesn't remember. It's a mechanism, if you will, to safeguard a brand new journey. But in limbo, everything comes back the way last night's dream does: first as a haze of emotions that leaves you dazed, then as an impossibility palpable enough to make you question reality, and finally as a circumstance so incredible that you want nothing more than to close your eyes and go back to sleep in order to see him again.

So when a voice floats out from memories and taps him on the shoulder, Kourai's heart trembles the way hearts always do when dreams come true. 

"It won't rain," the known stranger says, his smile wide and beautiful.

"How do you know?" Kourai grins in response as he turns round and lives his dream.

This seems to delight the stranger, for he blooms under the sun. All brilliant orange wearing light as regalia. All smiles and solace bursting out of a body too small for everything within. At the sight of him Kourai has to breathe in deeply just to retain himself. To remain himself.

"You waited," the stranger veers off the scripts. His eyes ask for Kourai's again; Kourai surrenders them willingly. 

"I did," he affirms. For you. Thanks to you. Because of you.

"I'm really glad." The stranger's smile widens and causes upheavals in the pit of Kourai's stomach. "Is the wait worth it?" 

Kourai thinks of his previous life. Of his tiny hometown, a pocket of calm surrounded by verdant forests. Of his mother, who is boundless grace and beauty, who dries his tears when he falls down from the swing while trying to reach the sky at the age of 7. His best friend—his partner in crime and in life as they chase one another across the hills and around the world. And his birds—all the majestic creatures he devotes his life to studying. Hopping birds, high-flying birds, hovering birds. How they glide, how they flap, how they soar. How they charge headfirst into the wind to take off. How their wings, their bodies, their skeletons, are all made for flight. 

He tells the stranger all of these and more, to show him that yes, the wait is worth it. Yes, life is still unfair, and cruel, and savage, but the highs at the summit, where he can almost hear the fluttering of the secondary coverts on the wings of the common cranes, make rock bottoms easier to endure. And in the darkest of nights, when the world caves in, when the stars are too bruised to shine, a priority list keeps him walking, on and on and on. 

"I'm still not sure about eggs," Kourai says. The stranger laughs out loud. 

In return, the stranger tells Kourai about himself, about the bustling city he calls home. There's an aviation academy there, where he learns to become a pilot. The instructors are all cantankerous old men, but the flight simulators are miracle workers. And from the cockpit of his plane—the real one—the sky, the land, the sea all coalesce into an oeuvre more heady than Scotch, one taste of which is enough to leave him dizzy. 

"But you always come back," Kourai states. It's a matter of fact.

The stranger looks surprised. His entire body goes quiet; his lips part slightly. For a second his eyes focus on Kourai and on nothing at all, lost and found in his own memories. Then he blinks, and sunlight streams back to halo his entire face once more, from the left corner of his mouth to the tips of his long eyelashes. 

"But I always come back," he repeats, grinning so so bright. Kourai can only stare, mesmerised.

As the stranger unfurls into angles of attack and anemometer readings, Kourai becomes drunk with the need to chase too. How can he not, when the stranger's eyes spark resplendence as he charges headfirst into the world to take off, even if only in reminiscence. Kourai feels in his veins the telltale want to capture, if only by sight, this striking creature, winged by dares and desires and devotion. To study him, to lay him open, to dip fingers into his quintessence, to recast paragons and rebuilt paradigms in his image.

He tells the stranger none of these. Wants made into words are treacherous things, especially here, in limbo, where all you can do is wait. So for the stranger's tales of man-made wings he trades only moulting feathers. The curvatures of alula in motion. The speed of Andean condors. The cry of antwrens in springtide. 

The stranger doesn't seem to mind, as he listens and talks and listens with all the liveliness of a murmuration of starlings. And so they be, talking and listening and talking, for 2 hours and 2 years and 2 centuries, since by each other's side, time is relative. Eternity of stories lasts a blink of an eye. Seconds of intimacy feel like an entire history. Linearity bends into circularity morphs into a Möbius strip. 

So much so that only when the end arrives does Kourai ask the stranger for something meant for the very beginning. 

"Your name, please," he says contritely as they are about to part ways.

The stranger's eyes tip over from orange into guilt. Kourai isn't the only one who lets their fast-formed intimacy make short work of decorum and turn salutations into postscripts. The realisation is honey sweet, like a poison. Or a panacea. It makes no difference here.

"Hinata Shouyou," the stranger—Hinata—offers.

"Hoshiumi Kourai," Kourai gives back. He thinks he has picked up a bargain. There's no way this is an equivalent exchange, when his name means so little and Hinata's is worth an entire sun. Like an underhand merchant he keeps it, rolling it on his tongue while he boards the plane, grinding it with his molars as he feels the pushback. When the plane lifts off, he swallows everything. 

\---

In the next life, Kourai doesn't study birds. He becomes a treasure hunter. He searches the world once and again for rarities, oddities, obscurities. He also searches, blindly, unknowingly, for a particular _déjà vu_. A past that shouldn't be. A shadow that shouldn't exist.

It is well within the job scope, sure, but he never does find it (him), no matter how many caves he digs, how many mountains he flattens. So in a desperate attempt to fill that small but perennial cavity in his chest, he eats eggs. Raw, whole, over steaming rice, white and orange commingling into a silky, slippery mixture. He doesn't like eggs, not really. But he likes the look of yolks. He likes the act of eating eggs. The act of swallowing suns. 

He also turns to fiction—the hybrid of reality and dream, straddling to be and not to be. Between expeditions and excavations, he devours books and consumes films often enough to fall in love and out of love and in love again with grand romantic gestures at points of departure. A lover running after the train for a last glimpse. A beloved racing through a seaport for a second chance. 

He can't explain it, this reluctant fixation. In one of his letters, Sachirou calls it an occupational disease. Kourai chortles, but he remains unconvinced. This feels more primal, more bone-deep. Like a sob snapping ribs in half to escape. Like a grief shredding heartstrings to pieces in mourning. 

But since life is dreadfully, damnably unfair, comprehension only reaches Kourai after life, between lives, on an old steam train. And when he catches sight of sun-soaked orange waving and weaving through the crowd as the train clunks into life, he almost chokes with laughter. Dream and _déjà vu_ and fiction and fixation collide in so spectacular an explosion of irony that laughter is the only choice left.

"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING, HINATA SHOUYOU?" he sticks his head out of the window and bellows, the name rushing out of his throat like a breath long-held. 

"I DON'T KNOW," Hinata roars back, running and laughing as though he also doesn't have a choice, "I JUST WANT TO SAY HELLO. OR GOODBYE." 

Second chance. Last glimpse. The train pulls out of the station. Kourai watches Hinata reach the end of the platform and shrink to a drop of light; Orpheus and Eurydice; Izanagi and Izanami. 

Lover and beloved. 

\---

f. fall in love with said stranger

\---

Is it love, Kourai wonders. He samples other names. Admiration is too light, adoration too tangy. Infatuation feels heavy on the palate, pungent and pedestrian. Fascination fizzes like champagne but sours less elegantly.

Love, though, love is just the right shade of sweetness. Enough to coax. Enough to linger. Enough to stir and stoke yearning.

Kourai groans.

He loves and has loved and will love throughout all his lives, future past and present. But between lives, all you can do is wait. All you should do is wait. Not sitting and speaking and soaking in a sun. Not letting his warmth seep into the depth of you until it builds up molten then erupts with a salute and pulverises its way from limbo to life, God's mechanism be damned. 

In life, they never ever cross paths. In life, in so many lives already, Kourai makes priority lists. He admires birds. He eats eggs. He reads books and watches films. He also has an ever-expanding cavity that forces him to search every corner for that one orange _déjà vu_. It ruins him, in some ways. Forms little cracks in his psyche that widen into crevices that will, one day, rupture into chasms and swallow him.

Life is unfair, but this is a brand new kind of cruelty. A savagery so inventive that Kourai almost wants to tip his fanciest bowler hat to life, to God, before he wrestles them to hell. 

"Hoshiumi- _san_ , what's wrong?" Hinata asks, the tips of his fingers staining Kourai's shoulder with fervour.

They are standing side by side in the middle of a seaport. It's a perfect day to set sail. The sea is calm, the wind gentle. Everything is bright: the throng of fellow sea-travellers around them, the massive cruise ships looming like sea monsters from afar, the gulls—actual sea monsters—screeching with mirth and merriment overhead. 

The view here is as devastating as from the bus stop perching on the sea cliff. 

"Nothing," Kourai sighs. "It's just—the sea reminds me of the old bus stop."

"Where the war ended?"

"Yeah." Where they first met, under a sunless sky. 

A pair of sun-soaked eyes find Kourai's like they always do. 

"Thank God we are no longer enemies," Hinata says. His face is flushed. His smile turns sheepish. A sense of _déjà vu_ hits Kourai, dragging him down and lifting him up in one fell swoop. Kourai knows, feels, that Hinata is about to say something that will again undo him thread by thread. Something that will be his damnation. His salvation. 

"If we were, I would have to commit treason," Hinata finishes, his voice as light as steel. For you. Thanks to you. Because of you. 

Kourai lets out a long-held breath. He casts his eyes skywards.

In limbo, you can only wait.

\---

Hoshiumi Kourai is not going to wait. 

The fluorescent lamp throws ghosts onto the floor. Kourai blinks, unable to adjust to the dimness. They are underground, in a tube station. The place is crowded, cramped, crumbling. Advertisement posters cling precariously to the yellowed tiles on the wall. Every whisper makes the entire platform shudder. The light flickers at regular intervals; the blurry humanoid shadows fidget accordingly. 

Kourai takes a deep breath. He can hear the rattling of an incoming train. 

The destination display flips to 382. The ticket in Kourai's hand carries the same number. 

The train arrives and opens all its doors at once, causing a small tremor. No one alights as a mater of course, but the platform still convulses as travellers prepare to board, forming a disorderly mass of tangled limbs and bodies by each and every door. 

Kourai blinks again. He doesn't move. He has a priority list.

"What are you doing, Hoshiumi- _san_? Isn't this your train?" Hinata's voice beside him sounds so far away. 

Kourai turns to face Hinata. Orange eyes remain sun-like even underground, underneath artificial light. 

"Yeah, well, I'm not going."

"What do you mean you're not going?" Hinata panicked a little. There's a little quiver in his voice that Kourai wants to catch, wants to cup in his hand like a butterfly, a firefly, a tiny, short-lived, beautiful wonder. 

"I'm not boarding my train," Kourai explains. For the first time he reaches out and takes Hinata's hand in his. The last time. His fingers burn; his palm smoulders. He caresses the back of Hinata's hand with his thumb. The act sets him on fire and reduces him to ash in one breath.

"I'm boarding yours," he says, more to himself than to Hinata. More to God than to himself. His mother often says he was born with a God-defying streak. Today is a good day to make full use of that.

For a while Hinata looks at him with an unreadable expression. Next he looks down the underground, sun against the black hole. Then he squeezes Kourai's hand with his. 

When they walk on, they walk on together, further than forever.

\---

h. look God in the eyes, say fuck you, and tear your ticket to pieces. in the name of love.

\---

God is a woman with a passion for interior design and a questionable taste. She is also, against all things hollow and hallow, to the desperation and detrition of the entire angelic order, very fond of irreverent rascals, rabble-rousers, and rule-breakers. Obedience gets no more than a perfunctory hand wave, but opposition makes her eyes sparkle.

The 14th seraph knows this. They really do. Nevertheless, they still choose to intervene. Call it professional integrity, if you will.

"The lack of retribution will encourage repetition and replication, my Ladyship. This will eventually lead to chaos on a scale hitherto unprojected."

"But I don't like wrestling," says God airily. 

The seraph's bottom left wing aches again. They think about early retirement. A little cottage far, far, far away from here. Somewhere peaceful by a lake, where they can raise swans. Maybe even a cat, if it's an introvert.

"Besides, my most cherished seraph," God continues, with light in her eyes and a Southside in her hand, "while not all rules are meant to be broken, some rules are made so that only the most fearless can break them. And what retribution suffices in the absence of fear?"

The seraph sighs emphatically, but they don't disagree. They never can.

\---

When Hinata Shouyou sees Hoshiumi Kourai trample gravity under his feet and seize invincibility in the sky, he thinks he has been through this before. In a childhood dream oft-repeated, perhaps, where miracles are points of departure and defiance an act of devotion. 

Nothing about this makes sense. Everything about Hoshiumi is a contradiction. History built in minutes. Familiarity shaped by firsts. Intimacy germinated from hostility.

It doesn't matter. Shouyou doesn't have time to dwell on providence and coincidence right now. He has a dream to live. He has a star to catch. 

As he rushes down the stands through the adoring crowd, he briefly wonders if Hoshiumi likes eggs. 

**Author's Note:**

> Eggs, hmm...
> 
> To Justine: this magnificent mess of bad rhymes and badder repetitions owes you its existence. It's all your fault.
> 
> Thank you so so much for reading. As always and forever.
> 
> This fic starts as a "oh let's do some warm-up for funsie" and spirals into an entire week of cries and crises. It was meant to be around 2k, and when Hinata's name still didn't come up at the 2.5k mark, I knew I was doomed. But I didn't want to be doomed by myself, so I invented a God and doomed the world with me. It was glorious. 
> 
> I'm (and have stopped struggling, thank God) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/alachat_) or [CC](https://curiouscat.me/alachat_).


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